Officers pull woman from submerged car

Tuesday

Gadsden police officers responded to a call Saturday night that resulted in a heroic rescue and a cautionary tale about the hazards of driving during potential flooding conditions.

Officer Brantley Massey was first on the scene in the 400 block of North 11th Street, where a call came that a car was in a flooded ditch. He was followed quickly by Officer Amber Brown.

The woman driving the car was standing beside it, while an elderly female passenger was trapped inside as the icy-cold water rose over the hood of the car, rising up to her chest.

Brown said the woman said she’d been driving south approaching the railroad tracks when her car was caught by the water moving over the road, sweeping it nose-down into the ditch.

“Water was about waist-deep,” Massey said, in the ditch. “It wasn’t up to my gear.” For the shorter Brown, water seemed even higher.

Massey said he couldn’t get the door open, so he had to break a window to get the woman out.

“I had the fire department en route,” he said. “I was afraid we couldn’t get her out through the window — that they’d need to open the door. Fortunately, they were were able to get her through the window."

Brown said the woman had a medical bracelet on her arm, the kind hospital patients wear, and she was anxious to get her out.

“I was really concerned about the possibility of hypothermia,” she said.

Officer Jacob Entrekin, who wrote the police report on the incident, didn’t mince words: He wrote that the officers acted “quickly and heroically.”

“We did what any other officer would have done,” Massey said. “We just got there first.”

Capt. Paul Cody said the officers’ actions reflect well on them and on the department as a whole.

“This department is full of people willing to put the life of a stranger above their own,” he said. “They didn’t hesitate to put their own safety in the backseat when it came to the safety of someone else.”

By 10:55 p.m. Saturday, when that call came in, there had been hour after hour of constant rainfall in the city. The wastewater sewers were overflowing, with water coming up through manholes at various spots around town. Those officers, and many others, had been out on calls all night; Sixth Street had been barricaded because of water over the road, and the rain just kept coming.

The area where the car was swept into the ditch is one of the city’s flood-prone spots, Sgt. John Hallman said.

In the best-case scenario, Massey said, the woman might have ended up with pneumonia, if they had not been able to get her out of the water as quickly as they did. In the worst case, given the unpredictable way the water was moving, she could have drowned in the car.

Brown said even if water hadn’t gotten higher, the woman could have sat there for more than an hour in the cold water.

Hallman said the officers put the woman in a patrol car with the heater going to help her warm up. As it turned out, when medics arrived and checked her, she didn’t want to go to a hospital.

Massey and Brown said they were both soaking wet from previous calls, but it was nothing like getting into that cold water in the flooded ditch.

They were grateful that their sergeant instructed them both to go home and change clothes before finishing the shift.

“I’m personally grateful to the people on our shift,” Massey said. “There were a lot of calls that night,” he said, and having two officers out of the lineup for an extended time had to have made their night more hectic.

“You’d never hear them complain,” Massey said.

Both officers said they hope people will take notice of the dangers faced when waters are rising around and across roadways.

“Don’t ever drive into standing water,” Cody said. It’s just too difficult to gauge the depth of the flooding and the effect moving water can have against a vehicle.

“(The driver) said the water was moving across the road,” Brown said, in the Saturday night incident. “There was quite a current.”

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